Follow-Up: Alnylam’s Biodefense Contract the Program’s Largest

Rebecca Zacks8/10/07Leave a Comment

Just a quick follow-up on yesterday’s post about Alnylam’s $39 million contract with the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency to develop an RNAi-based treatment for infection with hemorrhagic fever viruses. We just heard back from the folks at DTRA. Not only is Alnylam (NASDAQ:ALNY) the only New England firm to win a contract this year through the agency’s Transformational Medical Technologies Initiative, it also received the largest piece of the pie (and more than any recipient received last year, the initiative’s first year).

Here are the other 2007 contract awardees:

—Achaogen of San Francisco, CA: $34.5 million over four years to develop intravenous and oral treatments against gram-negative bacterial threat agents.

—Functional Genetics of Gaithersburg, MD: $14.9 million over two years for broad-spectrum small-molecule inhibitors of biothreat viruses.

—SRI International of Menlo Park, CA: $10.7 million over two years for its Accelerated Path to Safe and Effective Therapeutics (APSET) project.